Hello, my name is Matthew and you have discovered my blog about video games! Here, I will be talking about what’s going on in the world of video games, upcoming releases, reviews for games that just came out, and my opinion on many games. I might also do a few pieces off the news too! On my blog, you won’t need a quarter to participate, just sit back and enjoy the content. So now, let’s play!

(If you haven’t seen week 1 yet, you can read it here, where we talk about what is on your ship, and what you can do on it)

Ahoy everyone! This week we shall be goin’ o’er th’ different activities ye can do in this game! From fightin’ skeleton pirates t’ catchin’ wild animals, ye can do a ton o’ thin’s in this game! Th’ first thin’ we shall be goin’ o’er be th’ many islands thar are ‘n wha’ ye can do on them.

Full speed ahead Cap’n Chicken!

ISLANDS

There are a few types of different islands. There is your regular outpost, that has shops where you can buy skins for your weapons. There are also people who you can get contracts from, where you go out and get things for them. When I played, I gave a weird man a ton of chests that I found, and I got gold in return. I also went to this lady on the doc, and she told me to go get two black chickens for her. I sailed to an island, and I got the chickens, along with an additional one (that you can see in the picture above), and sold them to her.

Bringin’ th’ chickens t’ th’ miss

Then, there are your run of the mill islands. Each island has it’s own special look that differs from the other ones in the game. The islands usually have a bunch of trees, skeletons that jump out of the ground to fight you, and buried treasure. You get the buried treasure from a map that the old dude gives you. There also skeleton islands, where skeletons guard the island against pirates. From the ones I’ve been to, they have cannons on them, and many skeletons in them. The next thing that can be done, one of the games most important features, is combat.

lookin’ fer loot wit’ me hearties

COMBAT

Combat is a little weird. It usually takes about 5 hits to kill someone with a sword. While there is a blocking and charging system, usually the first person to strike wins the fight. If you don’t like fighting with swords, then you also have some guns you can use. There is the Sniper Rifle, Blunderbuss, and the Pistol. After you have spent all of your bullets, you have to go inside of your ship and collect more ammo from the ammo box. Next, the most important gun at your disposal, the cannon.

Some barrels o’ cannons

The cannons in Sea of Thieves are very, VERY useful. They can be used to send balls of lead into another ship, or send yourself flying into a ship or on land. If the cannons hit the ship, they leave a hole where ever they hit, and it water brushes near the hole, it can lead to the ship slowly leaking. It also depends where you hit on the ship, as a hit more towards the bottom of the ship would be more effective than a hit more towards the top of the ship.

Sea of Thieves is made by Rare and comes out on Xbox One, and the Microsoft Store (for PC users) on the 20th of March. It will cost you 59.99 doubloons, or $59.99. The game will have cross-buy, where if you buy it on Xbox, you also get it on PC, and same for if you buy it on PC. It will also have crossplay, where people on PC and Xbox can play with each other.

I am very excited for this game to come out next week, and I can’t wait to play it. I’m not too sure what next week’s blog is going to be about, so I’ll just let that be a surprise 🙂

As always, thanks for reading, and until next time, game on!

(To end this blog off, here are some additional screenshots that I took, enjoy 🙂 )

Ahoy thar me hearties, in these next weeks we shall be goin’ o’er th’ final Sea o’ Thieves beta! In this game, ye become a pirate ‘n can search th’ seas fer loot either by yer self or wit’ up t’ three other hearties. In th’ seas, ye can fight other pirates, do quests, or mess around wit’ yer mateys!

Some pirates comin’ across a ship gettin’ destroyed by th’ KRACKEN

If you couldn’t understand that opening paragraph, don’t worry, I wont be talking like that for the rest of the blog, just only for the pictures. In this blog, I will be going over the different activities you can partake in in this beta, and some of the fun I have had! So without further ado, let’s get into the seas…

SHIP

Th’ Galleon

Where you will spend the most amount of time in this game is your ship. This is where you sail from location to location, activate quests, shoot down other ships, and a whole bunch of other things. The biggest ship in Sea of Thieves is the Galleon. This ship has 3 floors. The bottom floor has additional storage, and the brig. The brig is a place where you cans send players on your crew, and once in there they can’t get out unless you vote them out. When I played the beta for a few weeks, my friends CRYS1C, TheFoxKilla, and Banyanyel and I would send each other to the brig, and would fill the bottom floor with water, and try and drown each other.

Th’ water filled all th’ way too th’ top as we pretend t’ sleep wit’ th’ emotes

Next floor up has barrels that are filled with planks, and bananas. It also has a place where you can fill up your ammo for your guns, change your outfit, and you can also change your gun. This floor also has the giant map where you can plot a course to wherever you want to go. This floor also has one of the most useful items in the game, the “bubbly barrel”. This barrel stores grog, which is a type of alcohol, and you can drink it and it makes you drunk. Drink too much of it though, and you will vomit all over the place and you can barely walk!

Me mateys ‘n I drinkin’ some grog out at sea

The last floor, or the deck, has pretty much all of the important things. The deck has the cannons, the sails, the captains deck, and the wheel for steering. This floor also has some storage barrels for cannon balls. There are three cannons on each side of the ship, for a total of six cannons in total. Each one can be adjusted to shoot up, down, or left and right. You can even get inside of the cannon, and shoot yourself to land or to a enemy ship near by. There are three sails, so each one is managed by two ropes, one to let down/pull up the sail and one to turn it. Each sail has two ropes on eahc side of the boat. The captains quarters is a little room that has a table where you can vote for quests, and store things. This is where I like to store my chest and other things I get from my voyages. The wheel is what you would expect, it has pegs for grip, and can steer to the left or right. There is a little gold peg, that helps you straighten the boat out.

If you climb up the middle sail, there is a crows nest, where you can get a better view of your soundings. This is where I store my gunpowder, because if I was to put it on the ship and someone was to shoot it, then it would cause holes in my ship.

Th’ Sloop

There is also a smaller version of this ship called the Sloop, which has only 2 floors, 1 cannon on each side, for a total of 2 cannons, and one sail. While you may be thinking that this ship sucks because it has so much less than the other ship, you would be wrong. This ship has better handling and can go faster than the Galleon. This ship is exclusive for three players.

Look at that ship!

This week, we went over the ships of Sea of Thieves, next week we will be going over the many different things you as the player can do in this game. (You can look at week 2 here)

(If you haven’t checked out week one of Operation Chimera, you can look at it here, in that blog we talk about the story for this new operation and a breakdown of the new characters.)

This week, we will be looking at what the Rainbow Six team will be going up against.

INFECTED

THE GRUNTS are the most common type of infected you will run into. These enemies mostly resemble humans, but from this picture, they clearly have some major changes due to the alien parasite that has taken over their bodies. Instead of hands, they have these weird spiky things, and spikes sticking out of their backs.

EKKKK

These infected have the ability to make their skin like armor and make it resistant to bullets. It’s gonna take a ton of bullets to knock out one of these suckers.

Here you can see some grunts from a loading screen

THE BREACHERS are some big, nasty, yellow, explody things. They are like a walking bomb, and they can either blow themselves up in front of you, or on walls or windows. When they blow up on walls or windows, they create a huge hole (even if the wall is reinforced!!!). Also, they have huge spikes sticking out of their backs, and some pores on their spikes that pulse, either when they are alive or dead…

A very rare picture of the breacher

They are very agile, and in many cases run at you at full speed. At one point in one of my games I remember looking around a corner and seeing one run at my and wall run! It was scary!

A screenshot from one of the loading screens showing some infected running over a fence

THE ROOTERS, like the name says, infected who root in the ground when attacking, and go underground when shot at. They even spring back up from the ground and can pounce at you. They also become very powerful when they are close to death, so be warned!

Rooter in the headlights

These infected are much rarer than the other types, so they shouldn’t bother you that much. I find the best way to deal with this type of infected is it constantly be on the move. When they are about to pop out of the ground, there is sometimes a circle showing where they will come out a few seconds before, so be sure to look for that.

One of the missions has you rescuing Jager, as he crashed his helicopter ad he needs your help

THE SMASHER is a force to be reckoned with. When you hear/see one of these coming at you, you better be ready for some team communication. These things are actually bulletproof, except for a small spot on their back that slowly gets bigger as it gets shot.

The smasher about to smash

One of the weird little facts about these things is that they are actually blind, so they depend on hearing you run around and shooting at it. Once it hears you do one of the two, it either swings at you and sends you flying through or a wall, or it charges full speed at you. Pick your poison. When it charges at you and hits a wall, it is stunned for a short amount of time, where it’s back is exposed. When this happens, you can either go up to it and melee it, or you can shoot it up. To take these out, your team needs to be willing to coordinate some tactics, and take a lot of damage.

Me downed after a run into a smasher

THE APEX is the last but not least infected in this new update. The Apex is actually the brains of this whole outbreak, and can summon waves of infected to do his bidding. He can also send projectiles at the opperators, which blind you for a short time.

The Apex being a savage, not looking into the camera, having his minions taking care of his dirty work

He usually makes his appearances close to the end of levels, and is a massive sponge for bullets~

Operation Chimera comes out in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Seige on March 6th 2018 for people who have the Year 3 Pass, and March 13th for people who don’t. The Year 3 Pass is $29.99, and includes 2-week early access for the 8 operators released in 2018, and 600 R6 Credits.

Well, that wraps up our two-week blog on this new Rainbow update. I had a blast playing this update with my friends, getting the screenshots for this blog, and writing about it. Stay tuned next week where we talk about a recent beta that I played, and my review of that game from what I have played so far. As always, thanks for reading, and until next time, game on!

(To end this blog off, here are some additional screenshots that I took, enjoy 🙂 )

NEW MEXICO-PRESENT DAY

In the middle of the night, something lands in New Mexico. After inspection, it is discovered that it was a space capsule that crashed. With this space UFO, brought a huge outbreak and a huge amount of violence. Because of this, the authorities ordered a Quarantine Zone around the area, Truth or Consequences.

This space capsule brought an alien parasite, and changed the whole town by turning them into alien mutations of the residents. The Quarantine will do for now, but won’t last forever, so it needs to be taken care of, exterminated.

Select members of the Rainbow Six team are sent out to control this outbreak, including some new faces.

And that is pretty much the background info for this new operation: Operation Chimera. Operation Chimera brings 2 new operators, some balance changes, and a whole new (limited time) game mode. The two operators are Lion and Finka, and we will be going over them in depth later. There are a bunch of new nerfs and balances, but we won’t be going into those. This new game mode puts your and 2 friends or 2 random players against different objectives. Let’s go into these new additions more in-depth…

Lion and Finka

These two new operators are pretty cool and special. To start off, while they can be used in the traditional games, they are specially designed for outbreak, and their abilities help greatly. Let’s first start off with my new main (goodbye lesion)

Lion

Lion is a 2 speed 2 armor operator, and his weapons include the V308 drum fed assault rifle and the 417 marksman rifle. He also has the SG-SQB pump action 12-gauge shotgun at his disposal, along with the P9 and LFP586 handguns. His gadgets are the flash grenade and claymore. His special gadget, the EE-ONE-D, detects movement and highlights that movement. Whether it be from players or from the new enemy type in the outbreak game mode.

Activating the drone in Outbreak

In multiplayer, when activating the drone, defenders have 3 seconds to move around before they will be scanned by the drone. If they walk around after those three seconds, anyone on the attacker team can see where they are, but its only for 4 seconds. During those 4 seconds, while defenders can’t walk around, they can still lean, and reload without being detected. Lion can do this ability 3 times during the round. The drone also cannot be destroyed. This is also the same for Outbreak, where all the different infected will be highlighted.

Look at all those infected!“Ha ha, you can’t shoot me down!” The drone says as he looks over the whole map in Multiplayer

BIO

Oliver was careless in his early years, causing him to get his girlfriend pregnant. He tried to get her to get an abortion, but she said no, and he got into a lot of trouble with his parents. After being homeless at 18, he goes to join the French Army, needing a purpose. During the army, he sent money to his girlfriend to support their newborn, but she didn’t want to see him anymore. He moved up in the ranks of the military, with help from his trust in the church. He then met his girlfriend, and met his almost aborted child. He found out that she was already married to someone else, which hit him really hard, almost costing him his rank in the military.

He focused on making things right, no matter how much it hurt

During a mission in Sudan, while protecting an investigation team, using his loud voice, he sacred away mob, giving him the name “Lion”. During the Ebola outbreak, he ran into Doc, where the two had an argument over Oliver being responsible for the death of Doc’s team members. This is where he got involved with Rainbow, as Finka recommend him for CBRN as a specialist. He joined Rainbow, and the two worked very well together. Twitch gave him the drone he uses for his special gadget, which is very useful. Oliver has tried to stay involved with his son’s life, but his son is having difficulty with calling him father, and Oliver doesn’t know how to be a dad. He has repaired his relationship with parents and sister, with the church repairing the wounds. The Chaplain that has helped him through his life said forgiveness is in the heart of God.

Finka

Finka is a 2 speed 2 armor operator, and her weapons include the Spear .308 Russian bullpup assault rifle and the 6P41 LMG light machine gun. She also has the SASG-12 semi-automatic shotgun, along with the PMM and GSH-18 handguns. Her gadgets are breach charge and stun grenade. She also has a special gadget named Adrenal Surge.

Activating the Adrenal Surge

Her special gadget, Adrenal Surge, activates the nanobots in the attacker’s blood, which makes them able to have +20 extra health, and have a much more steadier aim, with a lot less recoil. Also, any players that are downed are brought back up when Adrenal Surge is activated. But with this ability brings some setbacks. The surge causes attackers heartbeats to increase, making it easier for Pulse to see the heartbeats, and also when in Smoke’s smoke cloud, you take damage faster, due to your increase in breathing.

BIO

Lera was young when she was diagnosed with a neuropathy that slowed the degeneration of muscles and loss of sensation in the limbs and extremities. She grew up around people with birth defects, and her parents always encouraged her and her siblings to be active, so the tried her hardest to be active. Her siblings and she grew up to be really good at sports, especially Lera, but she feared that the neuropathy would get worse if there wasn’t a permanent solution, so she took things into her own hands. She studied at Novosibirsk State University and graduated with a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology. She stayed there, and discovered treatment for many pathogens and neuropathies, including hers.

For the first time in her life, Lera began thinking outside of her own concerns. Her research had saved the lives of perfect strangers, and now they were reaching out to her

She received a visit from the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), and she joined them and perfected her nanobots. When serving in the Russian Army, she proved her self-worthy to try out for the Spetsnaz. The course was brutal, with knife training with Kapkan. A mistake from Kapkan cut Lera face from her cheek to her eyebrow, but she punched his nose and ribs enough to break them, and enough to earn herself the nickname “Finka”, or knife. She became the Spetsnaz CBRN Specialist, and when invited to Rainbow to help set up their own CBRN unit, Oliver (AKA Lion) was her first pick.

Now you know about our Outbreak heros, next week we will learn about what they are going up against. (You can look at week 2 here)

The latest Overwatch update is insane! With this new update, there are over 100 new items! The best part is is that this update isn’t a limited time event so all the skins won’t be in special loot boxes. So instead of going into limited time loot boxes, they will go into the regular ones. Today, I am going tell you about my top 5 favorite new skins from this new update, as well as talk about the new map!

5- Blackhand Doomfist & Black Cat D.va

Starting us off is a tie for 5th place between Doomfist and D.va. I decided to do this tie because I like these two skins the same amount. I love Blackhand Doomfist because of how cool the Overwatch team made him. Instead of this gold new gauntlet he had in his default skin, this new skin shows off a more darker gauntlet, and a much stranger Doomfist, one that looks almost out of this world. Both of these skins are legendary skins and costs 1,000 currency.

4- Butcher Roadhog

This skin is my number 4 because it looks uber cool! I like the overall design of this one. On his feet, he has metal sandals. We can’t really see his pants, but over them is his apron, that has a very scary “Fresh Meat” design on it. On his belt behind him, he has the chain for his hook, which looks even scarier than his original one. You can’t really see his gun in this picture, but it is made up of bones of animals. On his back, he has a giant cleaver and a bunch of scars. Finally, his mask is made of a skull of a dead animal, with a metal jaw, and glowing red eyes. I would hate to run into this guy! This skin is a legendary skin and costs 1,000 currency.

3- Carbon Fiber Zenyatta

This skin is my number 3 because even though its an epic, it’s still a really cool skin. His face mask is changed to a carbon fiber and green accented highlight. His little waist logo thing is also changed to something that looks like a moon with two planets to me. Nothing much else is changed, other than his pants. This skin is an epic skin and costs 250 currency.

2- Immortal Orisa

Ever since Orisa came out, they have been introducing really cool new skins for her, and this one is no exception. In this skin, the Overwatch team throws out her normal green and yellow in favor of a very Egyptian esque pharaoh inspired skin. She is almost all gold, besides her striped blue headdress. Her ultimate container even changes! This skin is a legendary skin and costs 1,000 currency.

1- Capoeira Lucio

This skin is my #1 on this list because of how cool this skin looks, and also because I main Lucio. This skin changes Lucio by adding a more Brazillian flair to his usual outfit. Capoeira takes off Lucio’s usual shirt and leaves it torso bare for the whole world to see. His hair also has a change, with a wrap going around his forehead, and his hair wrapped at the ends with yellow, red and green beads. Last but not least, he has shoe lace looking things wrapped around his waist, and they dangle and fly around when you move in game. This skin is a legendary skin and costs 1,000 currency.

Thanks for reading this week’s blog. I know I have been just a little absent for these past weeks, but I am here to stay. I plan on making an explanation post talking about some changes that are going to happen to the blog formula, so stay tuned for that. As always, thanks for reading, and until next time, game on!

Once again, another Christmas has passed, but with that passing brings presents (and money). This week I am here to give you some advice on the many different sales going on and where to spend that sweet sweet cash on.

The Many Sales Going on

As usual, there are many sales going on in retail stores and online. The sales we are looking are the ones on Playstation, Xbox, and Steam. All of these platforms have amazing sales. On PlayStation, Overwatch Game of The Year Edition is only $35, and Grand Theft Auto 5 is only $20, and that game is always $60!!! But even though these discounts seem low, they go even lower! If you have PlayStation Plus, there are even better discounts. With PlayStation Plus, Overwatch Game of The Year Edition is down all the way to $30, which is a pretty good markdown for one of last years hits. Xbox has some really good sales too, like Star Wars Battlefront 2 for only $35 (and the deluxe edition for $47!) and Need For Speed Payback for the low low price of $30 (not worth the price in my opinion). Like Playstation, Xbox also has some special deals for the Gold members, lowering the discounted price. They also are giving their members a really good deal on their Xbox Game Pass, for only $1 for a month. But Steam has the best sale, with thousands of games on sale. Some of the best sales are Assassin’s Creed Origins for only $42, and Wolfenstine 2 for $30 (a game that I can attest to is really good!) Steam also has a lot of indie games for sale, such as Stardew Valley and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Steam also has their 2nd Steam Awards going on, where each day you can vote for 5 different games to win an award and receive trading cards for it. There are also websites such as Humble Bundle and GOG where they have most of their games for sale. Humble Bundle gives a certain amount to a charity of your choice, and they also have their bundles (as the name says) where you can pay for different tiers and you can get different stuff. GOG is also like Humble Bundle, with many games on sale, and they have this deal where you can buy a really cheap mystery crate, and get a few crates depending on which one you buy. I did it last year, but I didn’t get anything good (if you want 30 copies of Space Moths DX, hit me up).

I hope you got some really good games during these sales like I did. 2017 has been a really cool year, and I can’t wait to write more of these for you guys. See you in 2018!

There really hasn’t been that many releases recently, so I guess we will just go over the latest news to go on in the gaming community.

PUBG was released on Xbox, and it sucks: So PlayerUnknown’s BattleGround’s came out on Xbox one earlier this week, and while it did bring that amazing PUBG experience for Xbox players, it brought a very bad frame rate and optimization. For this story, we will be focusing on the Xbox One and the Xbox One X, Microsoft’s new ultra-powerful console. For Xbox One, players get 1080p resolution, while Xbox One X players get 4K resolution. The textures on the X are much better than the ones on the regular Xbox, but there are much more problems than just textures. One of my biggest problems for this port (and many other people’s problem) is the frame rate. Games like Call of Duty and Battlefield 1 have a frame rate from 40-60. But PUBG has a frame rate of below 30 frames, mostly at around 25 on the regular Xbox, and around the same for the X, but with a few more additional frames. This makes the game look really gross, and choppy. Even when the game first starts up at spawn island and there are around 100 players, the game can go as low as 10 frames. There may be a reasoning for this though, as the game deals with about 100 players, and the console has to handle that. Another reason frame rate might be low on the X is because the game has to run at 4k. But for me, I don’t think I will be picking up this title up on Xbox, and I’ll just stick to the PC version.

Friday the 13th will receive a new update: I haven’t really been playing this game since I got my new PC, but I might come back to PS4 or buy it on Steam because of this new update. This new update will have a level cap raise to 150! Along with this, there will be new Jason skins, new clothing, new kills, and a whole new character from one of the movies. This new character is Shelly Finkelstein from part 3 of the series. Not much else is known about this update, other than its release date on the 18th.

New Overwatch Winter Update: A new update Blizard put out for Overwatch brings new skins and a new game mode. These are some of the new skins (Photos taken by yours truly)

The new update also brings the game mode “Yeti Hunter”. and brings back the “Mei’s Snowball Offensive” game mode from last year.

There hasn’t really been that many major games releasing after that one amazing week in October, but these blogs will still continue. Next week I am planning to do gamers wish list, with things you should get the gamer in your life, and the week after that the specs of my PC, and what the games I play look like. Thank you for reading this week, and as always, until next time, game on!